National Trust
The National Trust is the UK’s foremost independent charity and membership organisation for environmental & heritage conservation in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Phoenix Wharf were appointed in collaboration with our friends at Magento solutions partner, The Pixel and UX specialists, Natural Interaction to deliver the National Trust’s new online shop as part of a wider digital enhancement strategy.
The primary purpose of the new store was to create a digital retail platform that seamlessly integrated into the recently updated marketing and holidays sites and enhance the commercial effectiveness of the existing online shop. The new site also needed to better complement the Trust’s physical retail channels by creating a symbolic and coherent relationship between them.
The clearly defined client brief set the challenge of growing the number of online sales and average order value, through improved usability and customer experiences. Key deliverables also included increasing awareness, better linking customer purchases with the cause and helping to change perceptions of the National Trust.
The new ecommerce site therefore needed to deliver an online experience that was exciting, immersive and emotionally engaging, connecting with the National Trust’s diverse audience and reflecting the core values of the Trust as an organisation.
To achieve this, we set about capturing the unique and distinct characteristics of the Trust’s estate portfolio with better linkages between the online shop and the essential Trust activities of history, heritage and conservation.
We embraced a growing culture of the ‘browser’, championing moments of exploration and improving the overarching customer journey. The resulting design solution perfectly balances the commercial requirements of an effective ecommerce platform with the increasingly prevalent requirements of customer engagement, storytelling and delivering memorable experiences.
